Takes up: Transgender Day of Remembrance in Chicago; Russian LGBTQ+ activist Andrei Kotov; filmmaker of ‘Crossing’ not showing it in home country, Georgia; and the Constitutional Court of Lithuania striking down “anti-LGBT propaganda” law.
prisoners
Thoughts from the Outside: The Pelican Bay Hunger Strike documented
January 24, 2025The Pelican Bay State Prison hunger strike documentary, The Strike, will air on PBS on Feb. 3. Faruq, a participant interviewed for the documentary, sees the strike as more than history—as an opportunity to reflect on the present and help determine the future.
Essay: Black August, from 1971 to 2011-13
August 10, 2024In the spirit of Black August Memorial, Faruq talks about the conditions of Black prisoners, the need to break race divisions between them and white prisoners, and the quest for the Idea of Freedom.
Handicap This!: June 2024
June 11, 2024Takes up: employees at a hospital in Japan sexually abusing patients with severe disabilities; the push to enforce Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act in the U.S.; ‘Menopause and Me,’ a video for women with autism and learning disabilities; and an update of the situation of people with disabilities in Russia.
Voices from the Inside Out: Millions of hostages held in the U.S.
January 8, 2024How often does the media talk about the thousands of hostages, innocent of any crime, who languish in America’s jails and prisons every year? Today, American cops make around ten million arrests per year. How many of those are based on planted or bogus evidence?
Readers’ Views: November 2023
November 24, 2023Readers’ Views on: Israel/Palestine; Revolt in Iran; in Canada for 2SLGBTQIA+; Trump, Biden too old to run; Racism in Tennessee; Prisoners miss ‘N&L’; Memorial for Paul Geist and Dan Bremer; Texas targets pregnant women & refugees; Ohio targets women and democracy; Revolutionary history; and Raining on those with disabilities.
Thoughts from the Outside: What is needed for prisoners to remain sane
October 7, 2023A recent response to Faruq’s essay on Black August and George Jackson: Deep in the ‘hole,’ Jackson went to theory to maintain his sanity. Subjective reason, or revolution in permanence, is necessary to prevent falling into fixed moments in our liberation. What is granted by the legal arena can be taken away again by new laws.
Voices from the Inside Out: Let’s try electronic monitoring
Electronic monitoring is the use of automatic, remote technology to track the exact location and current activity of selected individuals. Timothy Koenck argues that it is a reasonable alternative to the current U.S. policy of mass incarceration and mandatory minimum sentences.
Preventing recidivism
June 13, 2023Prisoner writes about how to reduce refidivism as within the first year post-release from prison, three of every five citizens will relapse back into a state of consciousness that begets physical bondage; one of those five will be murdered; and only the remaining one will maintain enough freedom to gain a job, have a child, and struggle to survive. If prison is perceived as a rehabilitation center, then our tax dollars will be used to restore citizens back into a mental, spiritual and physical state of freedom, justice and equality.
50th anniversary of the Walpole prison union
June 7, 2023Fifty years ago inmates at Walpole Maximum Security Prison in Massachusetts assumed the management of the prison for two months until the state and the prison guards’ union pressured the Corrections Commissioner to allow what became a violent retaking of the prison.
World in View: El Salvador youth gulag
March 21, 2023With the world’s highest incarceration rate, El Salvador is rounding up young men by the thousands and throwing them into its gigantic new prison with shocking inhumanity.
Readers’ Views: March-April 2023, Part One
Readers’ Views on: This Society’s Ingrained Violence; After the Murder of Tyre Nichols; Women and Girls Face Oppression; Church Sexism and Hypocrisy; Fundamentalism vs. Women; Call to Action; Censorship Here and Now; Brexit Catastrophe; China’s Workers and U.S.; Iran Revolt Continues; Azadkar, In Memoriam
Readers’ Views: March-April 2023, Part Two
Readers’ Views on: Ukrainian Self-Determination and the Idea of Freedom; N&L for the Study Group; Sharing the Paper; Climate Movements vs. Summits; Unsanitary Prison Conditions; Prison Exploitation; Voices from behind Bars
Voices from the Inside Out: Prisoners against slavery and for compassion
March 19, 2023Two prisoners speak for themselves, one on the lack of respect for Black lives on the streets and in prison; the other on how prisoners at Georgia’s Forest Hays Jr. State Prison are deprived of justice.
Prisoners need their mail
March 14, 2023States are replacing personal mail with digital scans or copies, violating rights and undermining rehabilitation.
Prisoners want opportunities to learn
January 25, 2023A prisoner speaks out “to raise awareness of how everything here in Utah’s prison system is going to hell.”
Readers’ Views: January-February 2023, Part Two
January 24, 2023Readers’ Views on: Iran and Philosophy of Revolution; Corruption of ‘Justice’; Prisoner Unity; Voices from Behind Bars
El régimen iraní teme la revolución, las mujeres lideran el camino
December 15, 2022El régimen iraní debería tener mucho miedo. Los gritos de: “¡Mujeres, vida y libertad!” “¡Muerte al hijab!” “¡Muerte al dictador!” llenan las calles. Las mujeres iraníes han inspirado al mundo y han advertido a los oligarcas de Irán que su régimen represivo está en grave peligro.
Prison and structural racism
November 12, 2022Prisoner Comrade Easley argues that structural racism and the prison industrial complex thrive on over-policing and racial profiling Black and Brown communities.
Shower or cesspool?
November 11, 2022A prisoner speaks out about lockdown conditions with rancid food and unclean showers.
Thoughts from the Outside: ‘If We Must Die’
Claude McKay’s poem “If We Must Die” spoke to hunger strikers at Pelican Bay. We were dying anyway and had nothing to lose with our movement to end perpetual solitary confinement in California prisons. “If we must die,” let us fight back with Marx’s universal of what makes us human, freedom.
Readers’ Views: November-December 2022, Part Two
Revolutionary Thinkers’ Dialogue; Trans and Queer Solidarity; U.S. Slavery Today; Prison Kangaroo Courts; Guilty Police and State; FBI’s Aretha Files; Why Read N&L?; Voices from Behind Bars
Iranian regime fears revolution while women lead the way to total change
October 22, 2022The Iranian hard-line regime should be very afraid. The cries of: “Women, life and freedom!” “Death to the head scarf!” “Death to the dictator!” fill the streets. Iranian women have inspired the world and put Iran’s oligarchs on notice that their repressive regime is in grave danger.
Voices from the Inside Out: What is criminal justice reform?
September 25, 2022A critical view from a prisoner against the criminal justice system: “If the criminals running the justice system aren’t held accountable, the criminal justice system will always be corrupt.”
Readers’ Views: September-October 2022, Part Two
September 13, 2022Readers’ Views on Hegel’s Third Attitude; Capital, Fascism & Revolution, Grasping the Spirit of the Times, and Voices from Behind Bars
Women Worldwide: July-August 2022
July 21, 2022No Birth Behind Bars “feed-in” in London; Cross-Border Network of Mexico and U.S. abortion rights groups formed; Montreal protest of the prostitution common at Grand Prix auto race; study finds women less likely to receive credit for their scientific work.
Voices from the Inside Out: End life without parole
July 20, 2022Prisoner Sam Lint writes about working to change South Dakota’s lifer law as South Dakota is one of only two states that have no option for parole if you have a life sentence; and one of the only two states that will give a life sentence for manslaughter. “Life” is natural life here, and they don’t mind giving it out.
Readers’ Views: July-August 2022, Part Two
July 12, 2022Readers’ Views on: Dialectics of Philosophy and Organization; Pelican Bay Hunger Strike Pamphlet; Prison and Slavery; On Lockdown; Prison Censorship; Voices from behind Bars
Voices from the Inside Out: When ‘rehabilitation’ equals slavery
May 20, 2022A Colorado bill redefined prison as “rehabilitation.” But the prison still controls how much of the minimum wage goes to the prisoner who works for capitalists.
Thoughts from the Outside: Capital’s discarded lives
May 19, 2022The shooting of a former prisoner working to help homeless people revealed the prison outside, and a cry for a new humanity.
Prisoner strikes and struggles through Marxist-Humanist lens
Commemorating the 10th anniversary of the historic prison hunger strikes that ended California’s permanent solitary confinement, Faruq and Urszula Wislanka give a retrospective/perspective on our involvement in prison issues with two talks on “Historic hunger strikes: 10 years after” and “Listening to women prisoners with Marxist-Humanist ‘ears’”
Readers’ Views: May-June 2022, part one
Readers’ Views on: Abortion Bans vs. Women and Freedom; Anti-War, Pro-Democracy Voices from Russia; Patriarchy Attacked; Putin’s Brutal War
Readers’ Views: May-June 2022, part two
Readers’ Views on: Philosophy vs. Capitalism; Education for What?; Homelessness and Humanism; Religious Oppression; Voices from Behind Bars
Readers’ Views: March-April 2022, Part Two
March 19, 2022Readers’ Views on Absolute Idea and Self-Liberation; Labor and Ecology; Avoiding Race; and Voices from behind Bars.
Voices From the Inside Out: Penn. prison abuses the mentally ill
The voice of a prisoner in Pennsylvania tells us about the harsh experience of being in solitary confinement for the mentally ill.
Thoughts from the Outside: Homelessness & the needed humanism
February 5, 2022Faruq observes that the money going into the “homeless problem” is spent on mediators, not the people who are homeless, who must be related to as human beings, as part of setting afoot a new human being for the whole world.
Voices from the Inside Out: New prison policy violates the law
A new Wisconsin policy on mail to prisoners breaks the law and violates their rights, senders’ rights and due process.
Untitled (Unexceptional and Unforgettable)
Charles Tookers’ ode to his first three years of solitary confinement
Readers’ Views: January-February 2022, Part Two
Readers’ Views on: Racist Censorship; Learning from 1619; Backlash to Women, Blacks; Racism and the Far Right; Censorship in Prison; The 13th Amendment and Slave Labor; Incarcerated Immigrants Face Racism; Trans Women Abused in Prison; Prison Activist Resource Center (Parc)
Voices from the Inside Out: Criminal priorities
November 19, 2021Robert Taliaferro denounces the exacerbated inequalities of capitalism in the U.S.: while, in a Midwestern prison, hundreds of pounds of organically grown vegetables and fruits were allowed to rot, one out of five Black families face food insecurity.
Readers’ Views: November-December 2021, Part One
Readers’ Views on Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives 2021-2022; Labor shortage?; Workers as reason; Support El Milagro workers!; Detroit women’s march; Chapelle’s sexism; Afghans dead and buried; Betrayal of Haitians; and Which side are you on?
Readers’ Views: November-December 2021, Part Two
November 17, 2021Readers’ Views on Philosopher-revolutionaries; Youth, climate and the freedom idea; Climate crisis; California fires, FDA fails women, and Voices from behind bars.
Readers’ Views: September-October 2021
September 21, 2021Readers’ Views on: Solidarity with Palestinians; Attacks on Democracy; Iranian Revolt; Musicians’ Labor; Damage to Homeless; Covid-19 Killers; Trump and Taliban; Far Right in Portland; Critical Race Theory; Prisoners under Fire; Voices from Behind Bars; Only the Dialectic Can Save Us
Readers’ Views: July-August 2021, part two
July 5, 2021Readers’ Views on Covid-19 in Prisons; Labor and Capitalism; Weeds and Flowers; Censorship; Politics of Snitching, and Voices from Behind Bars.
Thoughts From the Outside: Capital is out of control
June 29, 2021Where I work among the homeless on the street, I see the infinite degradation experienced by those discarded by capitalist society and barely surviving on its margins. There were always those who live on the edge. Karl Marx was describing the lack of transparency in social relations: what appears to be a free decision to sell your labor is nothing of the kind. Yet people stay away from thinking about how all labor, even paid labor, is forced labor.
Readers’ Views: May-June 2021, part two
May 8, 2021Readers’ Views on: A Colombian View: What Is Socialism?; Trevor Wins!; Detroit School Fight; Suez Accident; What Prisoners Want; Voices From Behind Bars
Becoming new men
Since my release from the Security Housing Unit, it’s been an uphill battle to win the rights and freedoms that the prison bureaucrats don’t want us to have. Our objective has always been recreating liberation schools, but it’s a challenge even to get our own self-help groups.
Voices from the inside out: Prisons enable COVID
March 11, 2021A prisoner who got COVID-19 writes about how prisons have reprehensibly mismanaged the COVID-19 crisis, harming prisoners, line staff, their families, and the community at large.
Readers’ views, March-April 2021: part two
Readers’ Views on: The Objective Movement of History and Philosophy of Emancipation; Electric Cars are No Panacea; Pricing Nature and Lives; Racism and Anti-Racism in the Queer Community; COVID-19 in Prison.
Prisons mismanage COVID-19 crisis
February 7, 2021A prisoner who got COVID-19 writes about how prisons have reprehensibly mismanaged the COVID-19 crisis, harming prisoners, line staff, their families, and the community at large.